Last month, I spent three days banging my head against the wall because of API rate limits.
I was building a small web app that needed to process hundreds of text inputs through an AI API — think sentiment analysis, summarization, the kind of thing that makes a prototype look magical. The problem? Every time I scaled up the test data, my app would start throwing 429 errors like confetti at a parade.
Sound familiar?
I'm going to walk you through exactly what I tried, what failed, and the approach that finally worked. No fluff, no "just use this one weird trick" — just honest code and trade-offs.
The Real Problem
